Acadammit!https://drblakegillespie.wordpress.com
professors get to go to school foreverThu, 11 Jan 2018 20:51:15 +0000enhourly1http://wordpress.com/https://s2.wp.com/i/buttonw-com.pngAcadammit!https://drblakegillespie.wordpress.com
What you do in collegehttps://drblakegillespie.wordpress.com/2018/01/11/what-you-do-in-college/
https://drblakegillespie.wordpress.com/2018/01/11/what-you-do-in-college/#commentsThu, 11 Jan 2018 18:41:38 +0000http://drblakegillespie.wordpress.com/?p=2076]]>My first year of college was pretty wonderful.

I stepped off the airplane at SeaTac, having flown a non-stop from Nashville, Tennessee. I was lugging an electronic typewriter and about 200 snapshots of my distant high school chums. It was sunset, and as the taxi pulled onto I-5 and headed into Nisqually, Rainier stood there pink and orange against a darkening sky and it was perhaps the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my short life. I had landed in another world.

Nothing about me is normal. You may know this already. But normal kids with (like me) a million World Book encyclopedias (it was 1987, folks) would pull “W” off the shelf, flip to “Washington”, and start reading about the place they’ll spend the next several years becoming themselves. Those normal kids would know about the Cascade Range. Not me. I stared out the window at that mountain with my mouth hanging open, unable to even think, so astounded was I. Many more surprises awaited.

Memories crowd out the reason for writing this post. But I’ll get there. At the first-year welcome lunch, the college president asked me from the podium when I would graduate. I said, “huh?” I met a girl on my first day in the mods. First. Day. Oh, she was so sweet. Over winter break I went backpacking in the snowbound Olympic National Park with my new best buddy. Midnight walks down to the sluggish waters of Puget Sound through the campus forest.

I saw Andrea Dworkin in a standing-room only discussion in the library, explaining how pornography was not merely immoral (like my Sunday school teacher said), it was exploitative and misogynistic. Later that quarter, Jello Biafra stood in the same place, raging at us to wake up to the oppression all around us. Professor McCann – Charlie, please – made me find parallels between Gilgamesh and the Bible, squashed Sappho and Milton and Marx into some kind of intellectual plum pudding, spoon feeding me radical criticism (and grammar, though he did like my use of semicolons).

Change was happening at an individual scale at my school, but the point was context and the outcome was an empathetic impulse that reached beyond the individual.

Thus college was … well, not exactly an awakening. After all, I was the 17 year-old writing to The Tennessean between D&D sessions, outraged at evangelicals protesting film adaptation of TheLast Temptation of Christ. “Did you bother to read the book? Don’t you have any sense of… ah, to hell with this place (neighborhood, town, county, state, region, state-of-mind), I’m out.” And I did get out.

I just didn’t fit in, in Nashville. People I cared about said nigger all the time. Hate spilled into everyday conversation even though most of the white people in my suburb of Antioch might have had no regular contact with black people, so thoroughly, deeply segregated the town was. Maybe it still is? I’ll not be finding out. Plus, my grandmother was Mexican American, “So, are you white or are you a wetback, Blake?” Nobody knows, or anyway knew, but believe it or not I did hear that term. Also I didn’t like sports, not playing, and certainly not watching; I liked to read, and walk under trees. And I didn’t believe in god; I believed neither The Devil nor God’s Plan were to blame… people had themselves to blame, or praise. I didn’t belong, and I knew it.

So, no, college was not an awakening. It was more like finding a home I didn’t know existed. If by home you mean a place full of open doors. Like thinking, “OK, it’s cool, these Appalachians are mountains” when really “No, wait, fucking Mount Rainier is a fucking mountain, actually.” We tried on ideas and thoughts like they were Jordache Jeans at JC Penny. “Is my mental inseam 32 or 34? Let’s ask Foucault! He’ll know.”

Anyway, I carried this fantasy of college forward into my own practice as professor. I see kids come in with one set of notions and I try to make sure they leave with a selection of notions. The university where I work is not the KAOS of ideas my alma mater was, but some of my current colleagues are pretty radical, both spirituo-intellectually and pedagogically. It’s still a ripe place for student transformation.

But I’ve been wondering about how they should be transformed. Or rather, what kind of options I should make sure they know about, and how I should present them. Whatever happens, I’m going to keep trying to reroute students headed to Pharmacy School into chemistry or mol bio PhD programs.

OK, then, yes, I’m trying to transform them into myself. Maybe my modus is “misery loves company!” and not “find the real you!” But I do believe in that route. I have had students enter and leave my class thinking all the same thoughts their parents did, whom I couldn’t seem to make an impact on, but by god they did go to graduate school and now six years later they’re radical feminists. So, yeah. Baby steps.

And this is how it’s been for 15 years, here.

Enter a couple of (humanities) colleagues, here and elsewhere, who sent me some articles during grading week last term. They got me thinking and re-examining how I should participate in student transformation. The following ~500 words are a biographical lacuna, with a lot of education-speak. Tune back in at the paragraph that begins “That first night in Olympia…”

The first notion, pushed under my nose like radical smelling salts, is that the university is not a well-spring of self-discovery of empathetic impulse that it was for me. Upending my vision of the experience, negating my experience. If it ever was, that idyll has been hijacked and repurposed into a wage-earner-generating, consumer model. Of course, we all really know that already. The evidence is all around us: the state stops investing ergo tuition goes up, and students incur the hidden cost is the interest paid to banks on their loans. And funds that aren’t shunted into lenders pockets get shunted into engineering and fields that “prepare students for the workforce”.

And as a students-as-consumers-relevant aside: a student emailed me last week. He said he was mad because his “need” for a seat in my class next term hadn’t been “accommodated” in a timely fashion. As if I was an order-fulfillment specialist at Amazon and it was all my fault that his x-box wasn’t going to make it by Christmas.

So this “neoliberal transformation” of the university (commercial model) was the fuse to my thinking, but the second idea my friends threw at me was the bomb: students and faculty are complicit in the commodification of education. Obviously, students see college as an entry to better jobs, better pay, stability, prosperity… so you can understand and even empathize with their complicity. But does that sentiment arise organically somehow, or have market forces shaped students’ thinking? And then the first-to-go-to-college and historically-underrepresented reality of my students often determines their approach, support, and success in college. This reality also helps determine their goals: do students see education as an end unto itself, or is it a means to a financial security end? If that is a fundamentally bourgeoise vision, then how can I make sure their experience is at least more than just training? I know everyone deserves more than that.

Again: the more loans they take out, the more interest they pay to banks. Or they work two jobs to pay their own way and miss the experience. Either way, the system worked as advertised: the product they bought gave them the skills they needed for their job. Well and good. But the consumer model does not build in that essential spark that college gave to me.

Of course, faculty are also cogs in this machine, meshing with their students’ need to find jobs. And I could write here about how even the craziest faculty are constrained by the governance structures of their universities, or university systems, by racism, by professional/financial/social assimilation pressures. But I’ve deviated enough from storytelling already. Yawn!

Here’s the deal: the radical in me is asking what I can do to buck the System that college has become? How, in a way that grafts into my own college-as-inflorescence rootstock, the various cuttings of “what our students need”? Because, while I fundamentally reject the consumer skills-building model of college, my scholastic tropism does bend back toward what the students want. Maybe I have to use “want” in the archaic sense to resolve this (their wokeness is wanting). But then, how do I do this in a science context? And how do I address myself to both the microscale sense of the kids themselves and the macroscale sense of change via “university governance structures”?

In the end, I guess this is just another iteration of my teaching philosophy statement. I’ll end with another story.

That first night in Olympia, there was a hitch. My dad kind of left me to my own devices, in terms of college registration follow-through, and I missed out on a getting a dorm assignment. Oops. So, as night fell in a strange town, I wound up finding a bedroom in a quad apartment off campus. I didn’t know such things existed, and have never seen one since. Basically, 4 separate rooms open into a shared kitchen and bathroom. It was scary and my housemates were a bunch of grim characters… at least it seemed so to the skinny 17 year-old nerd who’d never been away from home on his own before.

I retreated into my room and locked myself in. I knelt on my sleeping bag (yes, I’d neglected to pack a bed in my luggage) feeling lonely for the first time in my life. So I started pinning all those black and white snapshots to the wall. There were too many to remember clearly at this remove, but a few stand out. Me and my best buds on a last-summer-together backpacking trip. A boy who’d been a good friend since 5th grade. A girl everybody loved in high school but nobody ever approached, or anyway I didn’t. A few girlfriends. It was my college collage, and it was looking entirely backward. But in that moment, lost in this new place, I thought it was what I needed.

The next morning, I made my way to campus and voilà! they had a dorm room for me, after all! I rushed back to the apartment, pulled down my photos, and wrote off my $200 deposit. On campus it was a duplex… these were called the “mods” at Evergreen, for “modular housing”. The sun was shining. I walked out of my new home and saw Douglas firs towering over me. I stepped off my porch, briefly savored the feel of rich Washington State humus underfoot, and promptly felt the wet pop of a banana slug dying between my toes. My roommates laughed, and I laughed too, as I sat in the PNW late summer glory with a pretty girl on a grassy hill by the soccer fields, my high school photos completely forgotten.

]]>https://drblakegillespie.wordpress.com/2018/01/11/what-you-do-in-college/feed/1drblakegillespieEvolution… at a snail’s pace?https://drblakegillespie.wordpress.com/2017/12/07/evolution-at-a-snails-pace/
https://drblakegillespie.wordpress.com/2017/12/07/evolution-at-a-snails-pace/#commentsThu, 07 Dec 2017 13:07:15 +0000http://drblakegillespie.wordpress.com/?p=2058]]>The revival of the Snail Kite population in Florida – recently reported in the New York Times – is a happy story, on the surface. The Snail Kite is considered endangered in the US, and had been in decline for years, as its habitat eroded and disappeared. Adding insult to injury, a South American snail invaded Florida. The snail was Pomacea maculata, a species of Apple Snail. (like that? Pomacea? Pom? Apple? Ok, never mind) Probably maculata found its way into the Everglades as a result of an aquarium dump. This wasn’t Monsanto destroying small farmers one GMO seed at a time, or Exxon fouling entire ecosystems in one great gush. This was individual people. Though it must have happened over and over again, I imagine some guy who lost his house in the Great Hedge Fund Land Grab of 2008, and had to empty his aquarium – and all its gastropod contents – into the nearest body of water as he downsized.

If I close my eyes, trying to imagine myself doing this, I just can’t. Though I have spent plenty of time and money adding Gastropoda, Cnidaria, and Actiniaria to my own living room aquarium. Though each of us is a walking gates-thrown-open menagerie from the bug-infested mud on our shoes, to the plants in our non-native garden, to the Demodex crawling all over our skin, to the viruses we sneeze all over our colleagues. Perhaps the guy just accidentally dumped a snail or two during a weekly water change. Anyway, invasive species are everyone’s fault. And they’re probably unavoidable.

Back to the snails. These chubby little guys are much larger than the endemic Pomacea padulosa, which went into decline upon the maculata’s arrival. This would be a classic invasive species outcome. Alien species lands in new environment. Outcompetes native species for resources: eats the native’s food, eats food the natives don’t, isn’t as susceptible to native predators, changes the environment to make it less favorable to natives. But this story isn’t about the status of Florida’s native snails. We learned from the snail darter that people care more about charismatic megafauna.

The Snail Kite isn’t really megafauna, but it is a big, beautiful bird. Much prettier than snails. But eats snails, eponymously. And when its diet of padulosa began to be swallowed by the invader, the Kite turned to maculata. And you might think, voilà! escargot = problem solved! Snail Kite Cleans Up Invasive Species! But it could have gone the other way, too. Since Pomacea maculata is so much bigger than Pomacea padulosa, the Kite couldn’t eat it as effectively, and it might have been that the bird would decline even more rapidly in the decade following maculata’s introduction.

Enter a group of scientists at the University of Florida. They noticed a sub-population of Snail Kites with much larger beaks than the norm; Christopher Cattau is first author on a couple of great papers on this topic by this team (1,2). The birds were better able to eat the new snails than their small-beaked brethren, opening a door for the species’ survival and potentially for mitigating against the maculata threat.

The Florida group noticed that, within about a decade, baby kites in maculata-invaded juveniles survival rates increased by 50%. Not only that, but they saw that the kites’ success happened as their populations were shifting to what was considered a poor habitat.

So the big-snail-eating kites were doing better than baseline in a sub-baseline environment!

How did they do it, you ask?

By growing bigger beaks!

No, really, they did it that way.

So. The bird grew what it needed to survive!?

Kind of. In case you’re not steeped in the Theory of Natural Selection, that statement is what those in the trade call “Lamarckian” after Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who supported a version of evolution called “soft inheritance”. He envisioned a system where animals developed traits that they needed, and passed them down to offspring. Giraffe needs to eat leaves in high places? Grow a bigger neck. You’re welcome kids!

If the idea sounds familiar, don’t worry, it’s what most people have believed or intuited since Aristotle.

But it’s not the way we think of evolution any more, since Darwin. And part of the problem is that there’s no mechanism that explains Lamarckian adaptation. How do you grow a longer neck, just because you stretch it out every day? And even if you could, how do you pass on the stretched-out neck to your kids?

On the surface, this is what evolution looks like to humans: the need is there, and the trait follows. Everywhere we look we see organisms that are finely adapted to their specific environment. The Xanthopan hawkmoth grows a 30cm proboscis, perfectly suited to lapping up sugar from the Angraecum orchid’s 30cm nectar spur. This is a mutualism – the orchid rubs pollen onto the moth’s fuzzy head as it strives to push its proboscis to the base of the spur. Such interactions are common enough in biology, but the point is that it makes sense… the moth needs nectar, and if it grows a tongue of the right length, it can have its own private food supply.

Natural selection – unlike Lamarck’s model – provides a mechanism for change. Or anyway it does when combined with a little molecular biology. Stir in DNA and sex, add a sprinkle of random mutation for each little wriggling gamete, boil at the reproductive rate of the organism, then stand back and let the environmental conditions decide which offspring are the best at, say… eating bigger snails than grandpa ate. Yes, many offspring will die. It is a sad, short, and hungry juvenile lifespan for those normal beaked Snail Kite babies… but their long-billed brothers and sisters will make it, and thrive to pass on their big-beaked DNA to their offspring, carrying Snail Kites into the a happy future with their new, invasive food supply.

So is it still the Snail Kite, if it has a longer beak? “Alpha” taxonomists spend their time looking for physical traits that allow them to create the fine distinction that separates one species from another. They might even look specifically for different beak to rostrum height ratio as a means of distinguishing between bird populations.

Not so fast, Blakie. In this case it really is still the Snail Kite. Cattau and colleagues looked for signs of whether this was an actual genetic change, and found instead evidence of phenotypic plasticity. That’s a kind of built in Lamarck-ish tool that allows an organism to present a range of phenotypes, beak sizes in this case, that might in turn allow the organism to cope with a change in conditions. Stop and think about that.

You’re born with your genes, but those genes give you options: if your nest happens to sit in swamp S, you grow beak S. If instead your nest is in swamp L, you grow beak L. Cattau’s team uses an 80 year old tool called the breeder’s equation to assign the Snail Kite’s adaptation to phenotypic plasticity. To avoid putting you to sleep with the genetics details, let’s just say the breeder’s equation allows us to tease apart to what extent variation is due to environment or genetics. The authors argue that it’s environment is flipping the switch in this case, not selection. And it’s not simply that more food means bigger babies. Yes, they are bigger… but their beaks are bigger still.

It may be that, at this point, the Snail Kite has impressed you enough. It’s got a genetically stacked deck. It says, “Hey, I’m fine with my diet of tiny snails. But you change it up on me, give me a bigger snail… Whatevs, I got a bigger beak waiting right here.” Phenotypic plasticity offers the species options in a changing environment, can perhaps mitigate against the uncertainty that is the ecosystem. An especially powerful tool for threatened species to respond to the habitat and prey loss humankind has inflicted.

But this was not the story I was hoping for. I wanted to see selective pressure pushing so hard that, in a mere 10 generations, this bird had adapted an entirely new phenotype. That all the weak, small-beaked offspring had fallen away, and the more fit, strong-billed mutant had pushed its way to the front. I’m a bit crestfallen that the Snail Kite’s just pulled a trick, that it’s just got a genetic backup plan for hard times.*

Most people won’t care. “Yay! The Snail Kite survived!” And the statistics required to decide between the bird’s genetic sleight of hand and “true” evolution can cause the audience to stifle yawns and check watches, though some folks will be excited just having learned that phenotypic plasticity is a thing.

And the door is still open for the Snail Kite to truly evolve. Cattau, et al., think that the morphological changes induced by environmental perturbations set the stage for “real” selective adaptation to new conditions. My read? If those new beaks confer survival and reproductive advantages, then the Snail Kite will have truly evolved.

That’s where my interest in this story began. I wondered at the rapidity of the response reported in the Times, and my mind leapt immediately to the meaning of the New Snail Kite to its poor, small-beaked predecessor. To me, the distinction between what the bird was and what the bird is, is significant. Not because I think the only Snail Kite is the Pure Snail Kite of the pre-maculata days, but because I’m fascinated by change. By the fact that natural selection seems to demand change. Simply by presenting a challenge to the status quo (new habitat, new prey), we have a new organism – perhaps within the time it took my baby to get to fifth grade. Look, that invasive snail might also have been farted out as an undigested egg by an off-course Brazilian sea gull, the effect would be the same… just look at what a couple of confused Darwin’s finches did to the Galapagos. No environment is static, and so no species is static. And if no species is static, no ecology is static, since it’s a web not a chain. There’s a push-pull literally shaping the living world around us.

It’s lovely, really. And I don’t care if phenotypic plasticity and cryptic genetic variation are required to set the stage for the actual adaptation.

So, back to Lamarck. If we think of evolution as presenting – via plastic traits – a range of relevant morphological possibilities, then maybe the distinction between Lamarck and Darwin is a bit academic, or anyway overly mechanistic. To make Lamarck work, though, we’ll still have to abandon the idea that the giraffe acquired that long neck through repeated stretching.

No, it didn’t. It will acquire that trait, but only for its offspring in a kind of unconscious tough love for all its sperm, eggs, pollen, or spores waiting in its reproductive tract to be cast out over the world. That’s an overstatement, at least in the Snail Kite’s case: phenotypic plasticity set the stage for larger beaks. Natural selection may lock that phenotypic “choice” in place.

But to take the selection case to its extreme, it’s like Coop said: Murphy’s law doesn’t say only bad things happen. It says everything that can happen, happens. Bigger beaks can appear. That sucks for last year’s beak model. And it means that life can present as though the Snail Kite’s beak grows to match its prey. It’s a fine distinction, since the beak size is a plastic response to its environment. And if selection fixes that plastic trait, then what?

It makes me mourn that pre-maculata Snail Kite, the phenotype lost to the big snail invasion. Imagine or remember that the Tree of Life is actually a Tree of Death, with countless evolutionary failures hanging there like so many little Odins, teaching us about how adaptation is not a fix for the present, but a gift for the future, with new shoots constantly emerging from the scars of the old. And that even the current successful version is only a temporary fix.

Some will read this (haha, right) as an apology for humankind’s disruptive, destructive behavior. As though I mean that changes we wreak on our environment will lead to a new Eden of organisms perfectly adapted to the post-apocalyptic landscape. I don’t mean that. There are plenty of examples of buds on the Tree which have been permanently pinched off, their future-promise gone for good. Which truly sucks, especially for Pomacea padulosa. No, biodiversity is the answer, we know that. I’m merely reflecting on the fact that evolution at least has the capacity to swallow humanity’s bruisings, and regurgitate something new. That the Snail Kite may have a genetic hedge against environmental change is a fact that stretches our neck a little closer to those hard-to-reach branches of evolutionary understanding.

]]>https://drblakegillespie.wordpress.com/2017/12/07/evolution-at-a-snails-pace/feed/1Screen Shot 2017-12-07 at 4.50.26 AMdrblakegillespieOne thousand words about the road we’re going down.https://drblakegillespie.wordpress.com/2017/11/30/one-thousand-words-about-the-road-were-going-down/
https://drblakegillespie.wordpress.com/2017/11/30/one-thousand-words-about-the-road-were-going-down/#respondThu, 30 Nov 2017 22:05:51 +0000http://drblakegillespie.wordpress.com/?p=2046]]>This is a true story. But it is not a story about the United States. Really, it’s not.

Once upon a time there was a country. It doesn’t matter for our purposes where it was, but it is important that this was a country of dreams… meaning that it dreamed itself into being, like so many other democracies. It rose from its steaming forests but – though it was now actual and corporeal – like dreams do, the dream country began to fade and evaporate.

This country split itself apart. Taxonomists have a saying, that you’re either a splitter or a joiner. It’s a funny saying, inadvertently splitting the monolithic taxonomists into shards. But taxonomists are just people, intent on organizing themselves into social groups, othering each other willy-nilly. Anyway, this country, its people, were no different. They created sides, and built ideological brick walls. That was smart, because the bricks could then be hurled over the divide, to bloody the other.

Anyway they split. Or perhaps they were split to begin with, or perhaps it was one dream shared by divided dreamers. This much will sound familiar, and therefore kind of funny, I suppose, as you think “Ah, this is the US he’s talking about.” But again I promise you, this story is not about us. And, yes, it is about a real country. I have been there, a poor backpacker dragging my 40 kilo bag of books, journals, sketch pads, and stinking dirty laundry through its museums, back alleys, and cheap hotels.

But as I said, the people of the dream country split themselves into groups. You would easily recognize them, so can I call them Alpha and Beta, just so you don’t get distracted by how funny-oddly-familiar the story is? By how this story – true story, Reader, true – seems tailor-made for a brief Modern American Political Reflection, yes? It gets worse. Or maybe yet funnier?

Alpha was in power, had been for perhaps half a lifetime, placed there by the people or anyway by a democratic process. One election cycle, however, two Alpha candidates split the ticket, which opened the door for a Beta candidate to slip into office, having won perhaps only 40% of the vote.

It is said of the Betas that the Religious Authorities supported them. And that these Authorities seem to have advocated violence against the Alphas. Reader, I hope this doesn’t shock you. Are you? Shocked, I mean? I am sorry, but I think if you remain a Reader – and I hope you do – you will, after not too long, learn that Religious Authority often turns to coercive means to safeguard the piety of the flock.

So, the Alphas were unseated, but during the next election cycle their candidate was assassinated. As is common is such cases, speculation and conspiracy theories abounded as to the motives and support network of the assassin. Outraged Alphas rioted in the cities, while neighbors murdered each other in the countryside. Or perhaps the murder only lit the fuse of compressed frustrations. Meanwhile, the Alphas formed militias, while the Betas had their military and added to that paramilitary partisans. The war that followed – to keep you in suspense, Reader, I’ll not use its real name but will call it The War – claimed perhaps 300,000 lives. The precise tally is not clear, did the Betas’ government-sponsored fighters score significantly higher than the Alphas’? It seems that much of violence took place in the countryside, anyway, and thus that poor farmers probably suffered most.

The War is well known – among people that care about such things – for the appalling and cruel forms the violence often took. Now, the Reader will rightly protest that all violence is appalling and cruel, and that it cannot be that one form of war is more despicable than another. And yet it is widely held that the personal form of violence inflicted, and the fact that violence was visited on non-combatants, women, children, infants, the unborn, sets The War apart from other such conflicts. Reader, I shy away from recounting these horrors to you and instead merely reflect that civil war brings hatred into close focus, so close that one might as well be looking back into one’s own eyes as the blow is delivered.

In any case, The War lasted for a decade. Though such processes are punctuated by battles, armistices, reconciliations, the punctuation marks seem to be restricted to commas and semicolons; there are no periods, no clear end. During that decade, a fascist took power and so terrified the other elites that the military staged a coup and placed a general in the presidency. It may seem odd to the Reader for a military dictator to use the term “president”, with all its democratic connotations and trappings but, dear Reader, remember that it is all too human to ever cast oneself in the role of hero. In any case, that fascist president was also eventually driven out by military coup d’etat.

After that second coup, the people – or at least their elite and military representatives – decided they’d had enough war and agreed to cooperate in governing, and that the presidency would alternate between Alpha and Beta. And so it did, for the decade and a half that Alpha and Beta had agreed upon.

The End.

—-

Joke! A joke, oh Reader, and my apologies. I’m sure you know that there is no static happily ever after. The Alphas and Betas continued to disagree, but the violence of The War subsided. So, after many years and hundreds of thousands of deaths, this dream country returned to the unhappy but sometimes blood-free dream-state of affairs that is democracy. But I have elided the presence of a cousin, Gamma, that also fought against the Betas. Shortly after the end of The War, Gamma resumed the fight, and The Next War began, and – with its own flare ups and lulls – still continues to this day.

Moral:
Other nations have let political division rend the fabric of democracy, before we took up the cause. They found that the penalty of such division is not merely government inaction or unilateral action, it is hatred, blood, and evil.

Background:
This story is a non-historiographic retelling of La Violencia, the war that wracked Colombia from 1948 to 1958 and beyond. The Liberals and Conservatives, and the Communists, allowed their religion- and class-stoked political divisions to spill into political assassination, and thence to riot, mayhem, and guerrilla and paramilitary war. But in fact, La Violencia itself is merely (merely!) an iteration of a previous post-independence Colombian civil war. And La Violencia did not end, but morphed into a war with insurgent groups such as the FARC.

This story begins with the birth of my son, Oscar. When he was newborn, my spouse joined a Postpartum Education for Parents (PEP) program in Santa Barbara. I’m sure they learned tons of useful stuff in those meetings, but the real impact has been the friends she made there. The group initially included over 100 40 women; they grouped folks by due date, I think. So this was a collection of women whose only common interests were the babies that happened to them all in the same 5 or 6 week period.

Anyway, once the classes were all done, the women started meeting to socialize, and the group immediately fragmented. For my spouse, this meant finding a subgroup of working mothers. Most of the women, turns out, were stay-at-home-mothers… is that the accepted term, these days? Anyway, my spouse couldn’t attend get-togethers Tuesdays at 11am, as she was in the classroom (or maybe she was in the lactation room, pumping milk). So she started meeting with 6 or 8 women who had similar schedules. These women have been together ever since. A few have dropped away, others have joined in later, but the core group has met almost every week for the last ten years.

After about year 3, this switched from “highs and lows” support sessions to “moms’ night out” and finally became whole family mega parties. That is to say, the fathers joined in, as well as siblings that arrived later. These people have become the nucleus of our social life; in fact, sometimes they are the beginning and end of our social life. With 6 or 7 birthdays in November, as well as holiday and new year’s parties, camping trips, vacations, sleepovers, the calendar gets quite full. Which is fantastic, because, somehow, they are all – mothers, spouses, children – really wonderful, interesting individuals. We all have lots of fun together.

We have a sort of standing camping trip with those families in June, to a place called Ocean Mesa, just north of Santa Barbara. Fellow backpackers, campers, wilderness enthusiasts, don’t hate: I own that Ocean Mesa is not a place to find nature… it has full hookups, hot showers, a pool, free coffee, and a movie-night. All that stuff is important to the PEP family, and it’s not oversubscribed like El Capitan State Park just down the road. But it’s a place for this group to meet and stay connected.

Here, finally, is where night-sky photography comes in. During a night of Ocean Mesa insomnia 3 years ago, I left the tent and walked up a nearby hill with my camera and tripod. It was a new moon, and the Milky Way was burning low in the sky, diving into the ocean in the south. I thought, I can capture that, and with no planning or education in long-exposure photography, I tried. I knew I had a decent camera. A 6D with really good low-light sensitivity. I was shooting with a 17mm lens, so pretty wide angle, and I manually re-oriented the camera several times to capture the whole milky way. Exposure time was 30 seconds, the longest I could use without a remote, which I didn’t have at the time. I used Photoshop’s photomerge tool to tie them together. Must be a really easy problem for the algorithm, since the stars provide such clear fixed points. And because of the low angle of the milky way, there’s not terrible distortion of the horizon. You can see all the lights from the RV area of the campground. Nice.

Ocean Mesa

Anyway, it’s a pretty bad picture as these things go. The milky way doesn’t pop and the foreground is distracting instead of interesting. Nevertheless, I was terribly excited by this outcome, and started to hunger for more. I went out and rented a 24mm prime lens. The rental was cheap, but the deposit hurt (it was real, with $1500 exiting my bank account for over a week). And I drove further afield to the Winchester Canyon Gun Club, in the hills about 30 minutes north of Santa Barbara. Much of the sky is quite dark there, but of course with Santa Barbara at the head of the Southern California sprawl, there’s still plenty of light pollution. In any case, I got a nice lens, and drove to the closest dark spot to shoot. Here’s an example of a nice part of the milky way, near Sagittarius. Really interesting dust lanes.

Winchester Canyon Gun Club

I could say so much here, because once you dive into these pictures, beyond simply gazing at the Milky Way in wonder, there’s lots of astronomy to learn! The easiest way to think about the Milky Way is that we’re looking at the galaxy edge on. A couple hundred billion stars all clustering in the plane of this hundred-thousand light years-wide disc. And in fact, when we’re looking at this particular region of the Milky Way, we’re looking right down into the heart of the galaxy, at Sgr A*, a supermassive black hole that sits at the center of our galaxy like the axis of a colossal vortex.

Of course, you can’t see it, because of all the interstellar dust between us and it.* But that very problem gives us a nice sense of the scale of our universe. The dust lanes that give the Milky Way its character are nearby; the cloud just to the north of Sagittarius – called the Great Rift and – is only 300 light years away. At 1% of the distance from us to galactic central point, the Great Rift is the grownup that sits in front of your 8 year old at the anthropomorphic cartoon animal movie, blocking her view of the screen 50 feet away. That’s about the right scale, too… that is, if the thing you were trying see on the screen was the size of a water molecule. Anyway, the point is that the dust lanes are right up in our celestial grill. The Milky Way’s clouds, while composed of stars and other stuff before and beyond the dust lanes, is really a function of our neighborhood boundaries, with the rest of the cosmos waiting beyond the walls of dust. To be sure, the Great Rift isn’t the only dust lane. They are the part of the conspicuous gyring arms of our spiral galaxy.

Wow. Really geeking out on space geography. The point was, I was trying to be smarter about my images. I went started too farther afield for good seeing, but I have much further to go. Not in this blog entry, don’t worry, that’s almost done.

That first trip up to the gun club was cool though, because it meant I could intersect with the local astronomy nerds, called the Astronomical Unit (an astronomical unit is the distance between earth and sun). Under their auspices, I gained access to a nice, flat, open space in the dark for imaging. It just so happened to be the peak of the Perseids, and while I did get an ok Milky Way panorama, I was really focused (haha) on trying to capture meteors. Which I did! I pointed my camera at Perseus, and snapped away. I don’t know, over a hundred 30 second exposures. 5 of which captured the telltale green streaks of ice and rock burning up as they dove into our atmosphere at 100,000 miles per hour. This montage I am pretty proud of, and I especially like to see Andromeda in the upper right corner. Talk about scales… so the Great Rift is practically a next door neighbor, while Andromeda – our nearest neighboring galaxy – is 100,000 times farther away.

Winchester Canyon Gun Club, Perseids 2015

But the panorama I got that night points to a photography problem I’m still learning to overcome. The real ‘great rift’ in this image is where the edges of individual photographs show imperfect exposure matching. These shots are all a f/4 ISO 1200, 30 seconds, so I think the mismatch is due to problems with white balance.

Winchester Canyon Gun Club

The same thing crops up (haha) in the last three panoramas I’ll talk about. First, the one I shot in Joshua Tree last spring, on a camping trip with, yes, PEP friends. What’re the problems? Incomplete imagery and failure to get individual exposures right, in addition to the white balance issue. So I need a better system for mapping my images during collection. Eyeballing it is not consistent enough. Still, the trip to Hidden Valley was beautiful, the cold stellar flowers of night giving way to a high desert super bloom during the cool days. And days filled with long lines of kids marching along through the crooked non-trees singing “I like to eat, eat, eat apples and bananas” at the tops of their little lungs.

Hidden Valley Campground, Jtree, Spring 2016

Horseshoe Meadow, Sierra Nevada, July 2016

Now this one I shot last summer on a backpacking trip with the kids. I drove Oscar and Ines up to Horseshoe Meadow. We were in the walk-in campground, ready to start our for-reals trek the next day. After I’d read the kids to sleep, I got up and did my thing. This time, too, it was summer, new moon. Milky Way relatively low in the sky, so I got a nice horizon. Full of gigantic Ponderosas. And the galaxy is gorgeous, just glowing in the dark, dark skies of the Sierra Nevada’s west side. Even caught a stray meteor below the Cygnus Star Cloud! Still, though, somehow the exposure mapping is off. I always find the thing that’s wrong. Eeyore of the stars.

Campsite, Horseshoe Meadow

One other thing I hope to go back and fix in this montage is to build in the above image of our campsite. I think the real photographers out there would agree that, yeah, the Milky Way is nice and all, but it’s the foreground that makes the difference. Compared to the Jtree jumble of dark rocks, the Ponderosas are nice, but me thinking of the kids asleep in camp stands above all. As a detail, I should point out that Ines was not in the tent. When camping, especially backpacking, she prefers to sleep outside, under the stars, like her dad.

Zion Ponderosa Ranch, 2017

Ok, last one. The above is from just a couple of weeks ago, near Zion National Park, where we’d journeyed with the ubiquitous PEP team. We stayed at a resort just outside the park and it was DARK DARK DARK. I’m reasonably happy with this image, especially with Andromeda Galaxy glowing on the left, below the curve of the Way. I was using a remote shutter control, but there are still jiggles in some of the images. And 30 seconds worth of jet lights mar the upper left. Then there’s the white balance problem, still (haha). The biggest pain is that the horizon is so distorted. By the time all 8 kids were konked, and it was dark enough to shoot, the Milky Way was very high in the sky, essentially an arch leading from East to West directly overhead. That, I think, leads to the distortion in this panorama. And I do have one of just the Milky Way from that trip, no horizon. But it’s this one I like, because of the house. This is the big cabin that me and twenty of my best friends ate, played, and hung out together for a week in one of the darkest places in the country. Could the cabin lighting be better? Yes. Am I a hack photographer? Yes. But it’s the cabin that anchors the picture, and anchors my memory of the trip, of my friends and our time together.

Hope that helps, pop! I miss you! I wish we could go catch lightning bugs on Abuelita’s farm! That night 45 years ago under the pinpricked black of a Tennessee summer night, with the winking abdomens of the insects illuminating my room, I don’t have a photo of. But I don’t need one! xbg

]]>GoldernTroutPanoramaSdrblakegillespie11419319_10152838460845810_3343970003061621250_o.jpg12000878_10152989336955810_3582678193256419475_o (1).jpg13988214_10153598447410810_9154454470963144578_o.jpgpersied_milkyway_2015.jpg12961287_10153340018300810_4722459060566443028_o082617 - 1.jpg082617 - 1 (1).jpg082617 - 1 (2).jpgGoldernTroutPanoramaS13613263_10153530585080810_8958955474347102643_o21056033_10154612487295810_5146438538500285887_oKeep it simple?https://drblakegillespie.wordpress.com/2017/08/27/keep-it-simple/
https://drblakegillespie.wordpress.com/2017/08/27/keep-it-simple/#commentsMon, 28 Aug 2017 06:56:48 +0000http://drblakegillespie.wordpress.com/?p=1630]]>After the kids went to sleep, I had to record audio for a couple of tutorial videos I made to open my class this term. I’m teaching Computer Applications in Chemistry. Two sections, once a week, 3 hours each. Why am I teaching that? I scroll through my grad school chums’ teaching pages… they’re teaching biochemistry, or seminar, maybe gen chem, maybe a lab here or there, maybe physical biochemistry if they’re lucky. So what the hell am I doing? How did this happen? Here’s the answer: my chair said, “What do you want to teach next term?” I said, “What do you need me to teach?” Voilà. I guess that’s just the kind of guy I am. Instead of circling the wagons around the class I’ll run always and forever, I’m game. Or stupid. Or super excitable!

So, I take on this class, and I’m thinking… oh, man, yeah, we’ll do simulations, we’ll do molecular dynamics, sure… but we’ve got to do more. These chemistry kids, they don’t know from programming – oops, “coding” – so I’ve got to take this one chance to wrest the rudder of their lives from the “I don’t really know much about computers” tack, put them on the “I can do that” course.

But hang on, you say. This is a 300-level class. It’s the confluence of the transfers and the lifers. They’re walking in with a huge range of skills… some can’t use Excel… how you gonna make them programmers – ah, crap… “coders” – in a one unit class?

I’ll get to that later in the semester… spoiler alert, we’re going to build an instrument and construct an interface using Python. For now, though, yeah… the class has to slog through the core stuff that no human can seem to escape. And much as I’d like to say, “You guys don’t need Excel!” the fact is, they probably do. Heading out into entry-level chemistry jobs, they’re going to have to be fluent in Excel. And they’re going to have to make posters and presentations with PowerPoint. Better make sure they do it right; that is, the Blake way.

This week, though, we’re starting with even more fundamental building blocks. Citation management.

We’re doing “Upload all the citations you found into Endnoteweb and start organizing them in Word.”

We’re doing “But be ready to switch to Mendeley once you leave campus, because nobody’s going to buy you Endnote in that $22K/yr job waiting for you.” But maybe they’ll never have to cite anything again. Don’t get distracted.

Or, really, “Go big and use BibTex. That’ll impress the shit out of them.”

Because part of my strategy for the tool-deluge that’s about to swamp my kids was articulated beautifully by Douglas Adams: DON’T PANIC And don’t get comfortable using that one tool, either; you must be comfortable with tools. All of them. Or at least get comfortable with the confusion and fear that comes with anything new. That should be the familiar feeling. Before long confusion will be pinging your reward centers just like, well, whatever pings your reward centers!

At least it does for me. Perhaps I agreed to take the class because it’s kind of a fractal of my life modus. I personally improvise with the tools that are to hand, regardless of the problem. That means I’ve got to be able to pick up any tool. So, yeah, I’ll teach a class that forces students to handle as many tools as I can throw at them in 16 weeks. That means I get to switch to something new, exercise different muscles, see what I can come up with for them. And the students learn to do the same. No longer will they wait for the termites to emerge, one at a time, from the nest. No: they shall know the secret of the twig, and dip into the well of termites!

I will fix them. No longer will they be Mac people, or Windows people; they shall be Computer People. And they shall rule… with Computers! For Computers are tools! Freaking hyperdimensional Swiss Army knives! And tools are for building stuff! Let’s see what they can build!

There once was a rotten new president
his words and his actions were pestilent
true patriots cried
the day democracy died
when ignorance became the new precedent

]]>https://drblakegillespie.wordpress.com/2017/01/20/an-ill-augural-limerick/feed/0drblakegillespieWhat the university did for me todayhttps://drblakegillespie.wordpress.com/2016/12/06/what-the-university-did-for-me-today/
https://drblakegillespie.wordpress.com/2016/12/06/what-the-university-did-for-me-today/#respondTue, 06 Dec 2016 13:40:19 +0000http://drblakegillespie.wordpress.com/?p=1598]]>So, I should be working on becoming a billionaire science fiction screenwriter, but I’m blogging instead. Having, for all intents and purposes, signed off Facebook, I’m left stewing in just my own thoughts. I struggle, as many professor colleagues do, with how to act, post-election. While many colleagues report having mutually tearful discussions/debriefing with students in their classes, I’ve just boiled and fumed. I’m so busy, always running – papers flying, coffee sloshing – it’s easy to say, “Ah, the election has no relevance to a discussion of malolactic fermentation in winemaking,” and move on. And my science students do not express their dismay or anger, as my humanities colleagues report. Thus, days elide into weeks, and I get this feeling that there’s a missing ingredient, something I’m not doing to help me articulate and resolve the worry I feel. Time to stir the pot.

I’ve written already about tuning out social media. Positively, I’ve also re-started my LA Times subscription, along with the paper edition on Sundays; I’ve subscribed to paper editions of the Atlantic, the New Yorker, and Asimov’s Science Fiction; I bought my spouse subscriptions to Ploughshares and The Paris Review. I’m dedicated to feeding my family on fresh, whole ingredients only, and all my sauces will be hecho a mano from now on.

And now, as is being proclaimed left, right, and center, many folks seem to be abandoning or scaling back social media. So much for being different, but I’ve noticed how social media’s shortcomings seem to be affecting people. Just the other night I went to my wife’s work holiday party. It was fun. I danced with Joy. But a friend came up to me, pulled a slip of paper from her pocket, unfolded it, and showed it to me, “A message from MIT faculty reaffirming our shared values.” Earlier in the week, I’d shown that anti-Trump open letter to my wife, who passed it on to her colleagues, who each showed it to their spouses, and so it appeared at the party… people are looking for tools, actions.

That tattered, smudged scrap struck me, inspiration passing from hand to hand like a static charge. The MIT website had captivated me, as well, of course. And after days – and days stretching into weeks – of incoherent confusion and anger, my senses began to accrete around the notion that action must swallow grief.

Now, the CSU issued a post-election statement, and my campus’ president issued a statement, as did our academic senate. None of these fed my fire. All were unsatisfactory in various ways, but mostly in that they strove for a kind of neutrality, no, a vagueness that frustrated me. By failing to clearly state: “here is what is wrong with this situation” to avoid aggravating key constituencies… after all, Fox News blares out of some offices, and many students are Trump supporters, silent majorities, the University relies on state monies, etc, etc. The academic senate’s resolution is better, and I voted for it like everyone else. But it is inward-facing, with no goals: no one will ever read that resolution again, certainly no students will. But more importantly, it gave me no guiding light to act on.

So I went camping. My wife insisted on it. “We are joining friends in Joshua Tree just before Thanksgiving.” Ok, I said, but I have these video conferences to do for job searches, how will that work? Well, it’s Black Rock, there’s cell service. And thank goodness, because, as the desert wind stomped on our tent and whipped through the door of my car, the leader of our group looked out at me from my laptop and dropped some truth. She explained that this cultural surge of ignorance and hate is an attack not only on the marginalized and the idea of a multicultural society, but on the places where the marginalized are given a voice… in our case, on the University and on the intellectual structures professors build there.

As an aside, at that same party another person derided my livelihood as a professor and (dare I say) a public intellectual, proclaiming it “not a real job” and, since it generates no money, offers nothing to society. So, maybe the party wasn’t that fun, but I hope she’s reading this (I know, who is?) because her ignorance isn’t just an aside: it’s the point. I learned that my job must now be to help everyone, even college-educated professionals at private school faculty holiday parties, understand that Universities are not where their kids learn how to get rich; it’s where their kids learn to use their minds, learn to formulate questions, learn how to answer questions.

Anyway, I went home and started writing an open letter of my own. And, whereas I’m not such a good writer… And, whereas I hope the letter captures faculty sentiment more broadly… And, whereas I hope our letter is outward-facing… I started asking for help. I asked the woman who crystallized my thinking. I asked an actual writer. I asked a computer science professor. I asked some political science professors. I asked for advice, input, help.

And did I ever get it! There are problems with the letter. Some things are still worded poorly (well, I do write at a ninth grade level, or so one internet robot claims). It doesn’t capture every nuance that every professor on my campus might hope it would. But those failings are mine, not my colleagues’. The participation of my fellows was the biggest boost I’ve had in lo these 4 weeks. Never mind that it’s the last week of the term: we can wordsmith all weekend. Need a .org set up with email validation? No sweat; it’s already done. Need ideas for an evidence page so that the website models the best behaviors faculty have to offer? We’ll do it, and build undergrad capstone projects out of it to boot.

These are real connections with physical humans, bolstered by real actions. Not “all those in favor…” Not clicktivism. Not shared rage over a shared article. These people worked, helped because they are compelled to take action. And one more beautiful thing about working at a University (yes, I’m looking at you self-satisfied holiday party lady), is that I’m surrounded by people who know how to do stuff… all stuff. Think. Write. Create. Build. Invent. Show. Teach. Question. Answer. And for some reason, they’re all willing to help, all the time.

So, yeah, we managed to get this open letter (a la MIT’s site) published in a matter of about 3 days. I apologize for its shortcomings, but I hope you take a look at it. I hope you tell me if you disagree with it. I hope you sign if you feel you can. That you share it with friends if you can’t, preferably as a printed, finger-creased, salami-greased note. But mostly, if you read it, I hope you will stop and consider the real value of educational institutions and teachers to the wellbeing of our society… from pre-K to postdoc. No, universities are not the only place young people get woke, not the only bastions of clear thinking, not the only places committed to valuing difference, not the only places suffused with the will to open discourse and social justice. But they might be about the densest accumulations of people dedicated to sharing those ideals with your children. We out-of-touch intellectual elites might also be first up against the wall when the revolution comes, so show us a little love at your holiday party.

]]>https://drblakegillespie.wordpress.com/2016/12/06/what-the-university-did-for-me-today/feed/0drblakegillespiecivalues.orghttps://drblakegillespie.wordpress.com/2016/12/05/civalues-org/
https://drblakegillespie.wordpress.com/2016/12/05/civalues-org/#respondMon, 05 Dec 2016 15:39:44 +0000http://drblakegillespie.wordpress.com/?p=1596]]>Here’s an excerpt from the “about” page from the website www.civalues.org. I worked with a team of colleagues to create this page to build awareness of… well, just read on, go to the page, and sign on if you’re a CI community value. And please share the URL as broadly as you are able, if you support our goals. I have more to say about how invigorating the creative process was/is, but another day…

_________________________________________________________________

Since November 8, 2016, we have struggled to understand how to place our commitment to evidence-, inclusion-, and justice-driven discourse in a social context that has begun to normalize dishonesty and exclusion. Since becoming president-elect, Trump’s political appointments and policy positions have begun to codify the racism, misogyny, and anti-evidence of his campaign and have led to our deep concern for the future of our nation. A number of very worrisome incidents on campus post-election crystallized the need for faculty to take a leadership role in creating meaningful dialogue as well as space for action. The recent public statement by faculty at MIT provided a clear view of how the professoriate should begin to carry out their responsibility to the public. We acknowledge their leadership and the inspiration their letter provided.

A small group of CI faculty wrote this open letter in the hopes of calling on the collective wisdom and voice of CI faculty, and to set forth a set of principles that we can act upon in an effort to enrich and expand the discourse in our classrooms, on our campus, and in our community. Julia Balén, Blake Gillespie, and Brad Monsma created and edited the letter, in consultation with many others. Brian Thoms created the website.

It was a photo of my kids doing something cute; I can’t remember what. But for the next two days I rode a rising wave of approval from my two-hundred-sixty something friends. And I felt the endorphins surge as my mind rewarded me for my whopping eighty-three likes and loves. I shivered a little with pleasure as no less than four people shared my image, my ego concretizing in the wind of all that affirmation.

Well, ok, that very little bit of affirmation. My social media presence is small, and the people that bother to click, share, or comment is even smaller, really. But feeling myself respond to that has begun to gross me out. I cringe at myself for feeling the need to display my family or my projects to the world in return for what must surely be the least thoughtful, least thought-out kind of praise anyone could muster: a non-verbal icon that someone else, some invisible design-team, optimized.

I can see why I crave a bit of positive feedback, be it ever so empty, and I’m sure it’s obvious to anyone looking. But anyone who’s had to deal with the flesh-and-blood Blake construct will probably tell you my ego was always a pretty high crag, that the thoughts that matter most to me are the ones that originate inside my own skull. So I always have a comeback to my self-criticism:

I’m a meh scientist in no danger of getting even a wikipedia writeup, let alone a Nobel. But I have a lab, and get to work on answering whatever question I happen to dream up, so my existence is charmed in that respect.

I get to watch students work on other courses’ homework during my lectures or, worse yet, just lull them to sleep with my dulcet tones. But some of them do seem to get some meaning from the lessons-cum-Tarot readings I prepare for them, though they’ll just have to cope with not getting their grades back soon.

I drop my kids off in a ’04 Corolla with a cracked windshield at a school with a parking lot full of Teslas and Maseratis. But all the materialism and ostentation only serve to polish my own values. Plus, the Toy’s got 250K miles and is still going strong.

I’m old and fat. But I love life, and have had a shit-ton of fun, mostly of the highly active sort, believe it or not. Decode that why don’t you! Also, I love to eat: habeas corpus.

So, you see, in this particular case, it isn’t you (you, social media friend), it really is me. Or anyway it’s about keeping control of how I feed my need for external validation.

There are personal reasons for me to say no to social media. I’m saying that publicly, and so there’s a contradiction, or hypocrisy, or dissonance, or whatever. But I’m dialing down the Facebook volume in my life, as so many seem to be Facebooking about these days, to gain some kind of control over why I’m using it, not to stop using it.

Any time everyone else is doing something, the Blake impulse is (should be) to wonder why, not to rush to join. Ok, id feci, I did scramble to get in line for those Clash tickets that one time back in 1986. But the need for approval, the hope to see more likes, just to get that little jolt of internet oxytocin, contradicts my residual self-image as a man convinced of his self-worth.

I am compelled to add, though, that the elevation to the presidency of a manipulative demagogue precipitated the dampening of my interest in all ya’ll, at least insofar as the collective is truly expressed in Facebook. Again, my own self is the cosm. For years, I have aggressively blocked from my feed anything about Jesus, guns, or Obama-hate, fashioning Facebook into the echo-chamber I thought I wanted. And editing out wilfull ignorance, hate, as well as other – less repellant – types of cultural noise seems like a good thing. Or at least understandable, from someone like me, who grew up as a nerd and an outsider; the bullying people face in the real world, which has become omnipresent on the internet, can be partially mitigated through selective pruning of one’s “world”. However, it seems to me that the principal accomplishment of our “online communities” is to further isolate ourselves; humankind’s amazing ability to transmute lies into truth further wilts for me the flower of our so-called connectedness.

But hold on.

There’s no shortage today of journalism (can we use that term any more?) – as opposed to ranting – that is critical of the closure of our ears to different voices. So no one needs to hear it from me.

I am concerned with how we really make America great, however, and how the means by which we communicate with each other affects our greatness: the Entire Point of the Universities I’ve made my home in over lo these 30 years is to showcase, explore, glorify, Difference. To explore new perspectives. To seek out new ways of thinking. To shrewdly subject them to the critical evaluations they’ve never received before.

So, I’m criticizing Facebook as an inward-gazing medium – contrary to its claims of a community-broadener – and as thus counterproductive to the self-critical difference-mongering I’m dedicated to. I am pledging to forget about clicks and likes, and to be more outward-gazing. Or really, outward-acting.

I’m publishing this via my blog, arguably a social media form. Though it’s even less trafficked than my Facebook page, it is public, so perhaps my ‘community’ will be larger. And I’m still sharing the blog posts to Facebook. I’m just done sharing pictures of, e.g., the tarantula I saw in Joshua Tree the other day. It’s likely there will be even less interest in my Facebook feed. But who cares? It no longer feels real to me, anyway.

I interact with the outside world primarily through my teaching, so changing how I teach is the obvious way to challenge myself to find ways of fighting for critically-minded diversity validation-construction. It’s so easy for a science professor to opt-out of the deconstruction tactics normal to the University… “there’s so much content to deliver!” But I see the promise of science as one so universal, finding ways of making sure its realization is also universal must become a more intentional part of my job. Perhaps it will be the most relevant part.

Beyond my vocation, I’m challenged to be more actually social, to engage with my community in physical, not digital, ways. That’s hard for one focused on the molecular, the cellular, the organismal, the eco-systemical, the geological timescalical, having turned in the first place to those as easier, safer targets than the human.

Will he deport 11 million undocumented workers?
Of course not. Thank goodness.

Will he ban all Muslim immigration?
Probably not. Thank goodness.

Will he make Mexico build a wall?
C’mon, seriously? Thank goodness, no.

Will Hillary Clinton go to jail?
Nah. Thank goodness, or really thank the law, which seems to have already spoken on this.

Will he repeal Obamacare?
Not the important parts. Thank goodness.

I’m waiting to see how quickly your story changes from, “He tells the truth.” to “He just said that to get elected.” When that happens, please go look up “cognitive dissonance,” then get back to me to explain why you *really* voted for him:

Will hate crimes against marginalized people(s) increase?
Probably. Because his rhetoric enables it. I use the term rhetoric generously here; go read Marc Antony (no not that one), if you want real rhetoric.

Will the siege on women’s reproductive rights worsen?
Yes. Because his actual cabinet and SC choices point to his real agenda.

Will environmental degradation accelerate?
Yes. Because his actual cabinet choices point to his real agenda.

Will progress on sustainable energy decelerate?
Yes. Because his actual cabinet choices point to his real agenda.

Will our wars of aggression multiply?
Well, let me see… should the world put up with this shit any longer?

These were your not-spoken truths, the truths of the GOP. They were self-evident, but not actually spoken.